Abstract
The chapter demonstrates how, in the age of a crisis of religious faith, alternative metaphysical beliefs, founded in a ‘return to the earth’, began to take hold of the literary imagination. The case of Richard Jefferies is exemplary, and the argument stresses both the bleakly materialist representation of rural labour in his work and its countervailing tendency towards a metaphysical celebration of ‘soul-life’.
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Ebbatson, R. (2016). Seeking the Beyond: Sacralising/Desacralising Nature in Richard Jefferies. In: Landscapes of Eternal Return. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32838-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32838-6_7
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32837-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32838-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)